Rulers and Statesmen

Political authority in Islamic history was exercised by figures of very different kinds: caliphs claiming succession to the Prophet, sultans ruling by conquest and consolidation, viziers who governed in a ruler's name, and regents whose authority rested on lineage or on the loyalty of an army. Their decisions determined where frontiers lay, which scholars were patronised, and how far the state reached into ordinary life.

This collection gathers the rulers and senior statesmen covered across the encyclopaedia — from Muawiyah and al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik of the Umayyads and Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma'mun of the Abbasids, through Saladin and Baybars in the age of the Crusades, to Suleiman the Magnificent in sixteenth-century Istanbul, and on to the heads of state of the modern period. It also includes women who exercised sovereign or near-sovereign power, among them Shajarat al-Durr in Egypt, Sitt al-Mulk in the Fatimid state, Arwa al-Sulayhi in Yemen, Razia Sultana in Delhi, Sayyida al-Hurra in Tétouan, and Begum Hazrat Mahal in Awadh.